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Viewsonic goes mobile

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Looking to cash in on the handheld market, Viewsonic has announced a new PDA based on PocketPC that's meant to compete with lower-end Palm based units which account for roughly half of all PDA sales. The device sports the Intel Xscale processor running at 300MHz as opposed to the 400MHz version currently sported by the iPaq and Toshiba's e740. This is an interesting choice as the 400MHz Xscale has actually failed to produce the marked performance improvements expected of it, largely due to an unoptimized OS from Microsoft. As such, in many cases, I would expect this to actually perform worse than the older 206MHz Strong Arm devices, at least until MS releases an update to the PocketPC software that more effectively makes use of the Xscale. Undoubtedly, though, this plays into the killer price. At only $299 with 32MB of ROM, 64MB of SRAM and a 3.5" 320x240 color screen, you get what Viewsonic claims to be the smallest and lightest PocketPC available. That's about $100 below the retail price of the Toshiba e310. While the 4.2 ounce weight is certainly light, I can't seem to find any actual dimension details to compare it to the traditionally tiny (by comparison) Palm devices it targets. This could finally bring PocketPC down into the lower end consumer markets retail models have failed to penetrate.